A birth lottery winner, or a chooser behind a Rawlsian veil
of ignorance, today would likely end up not as a U.S. billionaire's
child (much less a random U.S. child), but as a child in Scandinavia.
That is, whether you're looking for higher happiness, life-expectancy,
health, education, safety, and quality of life, or you're looking for
environmental sustainability, social justice, and relations of peace and
generosity with the rest of the world, the model today is the land of
the Vikings' descendants.

Traditionally it has not been popular in the United States to emulate
others. Books on how Europe is better than here don't always fly off
U.S. shelves. Michael Moore's latest movie is not his highest grossing.
On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders made the Scandinavian model
the core of his surprisingly successful campaign. Many voices were quick
to tell him that his socialism doesn't work in theory. He was quick to
reply that it has nonetheless been proven to work in practice.

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U.S. states were once thought of as laboratories of experimentation.
When one state arrived at a more successful public policy, the other 49
could benefit and follow suit. Scandinavia has worked that way over the
past several decades. When Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Iceland has found
something that works or fails, the other nations have benefitted from
the knowledge. When the Swedish government experiments with shorter
working hours to determine whether they increase or decrease
productivity, there is a widespread expectation that future policy will
follow whatever the results show.

In the United States, in contrast, there's a general expectation that
public policy will follow financial corruption. Whether a war on
terrorism increases or decreases terrorism is not a question studied
with any anticipation of policy following what is learned. Does mass
incarceration increase or decrease crime? That's not a field of study
leant the urgency it would have if anybody believed our government would
act on the findings. Has restricting guns in Australia, or responding
to a mass shooting with a measure of sanity in Norway worked well? The
U.S. expectation remains that Congress will do what the funders of
election campaigns prefer.

Just imagine a United States in which, in return for your taxes, you
received top quality education from pre-school through college or trade
school, top-quality health care, low working hours, long vacations,
family and parental leave, retirement, public transportation, childcare,
adult education, environmental sustainability, and in fact all the
advantages that the United States supposedly now holds: a wider range of
opportunity, greater class mobility, more entrepreneurs per capita,
more patents, more creativity.

As Lakey documents extensively, this didn't happen in Scandinavia by
chance, or because these nations are small, or because they're
homogenous, or because Norway has oil. These nations developed Viking
economics through extensive and relentless, and ongoing, nonviolent
organizing and protest, including resistance to the U.S./U.K. push
toward the right that began in the 1980s. From the early twentieth
century on, organizers took a universal approach, including the
unemployed in labor unions, pressing for policies of benefit to all
rather than to a select population. (Imagine the Wobblies having set the
agenda rather than the American Federation of Labor.)

Norway ranks number one among the 27 richest nations in how it
welcomes and integrates asylum seekers and refugees. It does so in a
manner drawing on how Viking economics welcomes anyone who has become
unemployed. Rather than creating programs of charity for the poor, which
the poor never manage to find the political clout to maintain,
Scandinavian countries have created programs of training, counseling,
and job placement for anyone and everyone who hasn't found satisfying
employment. There's no stigma attached to government programs, and
there's widespread consensus on upholding or expanding them.

Rather than bailing out bankers who damage economies, or bowing to
European Union or International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands for
austerity, Scandinavian governments have upheld the rule of law,
expanded social programs, and -- in the case of Norway -- temporarily
nationalized banks to bring them under control. These actions, in each
country, have followed massive public mobilization.

When Denmark's government sought to impose Thatcherite austerity in
1984, workers didn't just resist, didn't just lobby, and didn't just
vote. They went on the offensive, demanded higher pay, shorter hours,
and greater taxes on corporations. Then they surrounded and shut down
the legislature until a compromise was reached.

When Iceland took the opposite course of the United States on banker
shenanigans following the 2008 crash, it did so after people surrounded
the parliament banging pots and pans so loudly that no work could be
done. It also hired an economist named David Stuckler who discovered
that in trying to impose austerity on Iceland the IMF had avoided actual
numbers in order to use theoretical modeling to reach its trickle-down
conclusions.

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It's time we faced the reality that government investment in
something other than war or tax breaks for billionaires actually works,
and that nobody is going to hand it to us or place it on a ballot to be
voted in.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)